What appears to some to be the figure of Jesus Christ has been spotted in the Northern Lights over Iceland.

Local headmaster Jón Hilmarsson was encouraged to photograph the glow-in-the-dark Jesus by his ten-year-old son. The image captured is said to have “an uncanny resemblance” to the Art Deco Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Mr. Hilmarsson told Metro newspaper:

‘This was the most beautiful and vivid northern light display I have ever seen. We usually see green auroras but that night I saw bright green, red and purple colour, which is very unusual. Many people see the shape of Christ but also an angel formation.’

Maciej Winiarczyk’s beautiful time lapse photography of an aurora display on Sandigoe Beach in Caithness, Scotland, from January 17th, 2013.

Winiarczyk explains that ‘each frame was exposed for 8 sec. with ISO 3200 and lens aperture set to f/2.8. All frames were shot in RAW and later postprocessed in Adobe Lightroom 4.3 and LRTimelapse software.

Beautiful photographs of the Aurora Borealis, taken over Iceland between 2007 and 2010, as the Daily Telegraphreports

Chronological pictures show the cycle of the Northern Lights - which are visibly building up year-on-year towards what is expected to be a spectacular climax in 2012. Icelandic photographer Orvar Thorgiersson, 35, a software engineer from Reyjavik, is on a mission to document the growing annual intensity of the phenomenon. His most recent pictures show how bright the auroras have been this year.

Scientists expect the lights in 2012 to produce a spectacular fireworks display. The event will be caused by the Solar Maximum - a period when the sun’s magnetic field on the solar equator rotates at a slightly faster pace than at the solar poles. The solar cycle takes an average of around 11 years to go from one solar maximum to the next. The last Solar Maximum was in 2000 and NASA scientists have predicted that the next one in 2012 will be the greatest since 1958, where the aurora stunned the people of Mexico by making an appearance on three occasions.

Scientists have predicted that the Northern lights should be visible as far south as Rome in 2012. However, if the 2012 auroras are as big as expected, they could cause disruption to mobile phones, GPS and even the national grid.